Sacred 2: Fallen AngelReview

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Kill, loot, and repeat in Ascaron Entertainment's action-RPG sequel.

By Charles Onyett

Sacred 2: Fallen Angel is a loot grind, no doubt about it. In that sense, this isn't a game that's going to offer anything compelling in terms of narrative or quest structure. Its aim is to offer a gigantic world for you to run around, whack stuff with weapons and spells, grab the loot it drops, and repeat. Developer Ascaron Entertainment's sequel definitely delivers on those elements, and offers up six interesting character classes to build and customize however you see fit. So if you're looking for a good old-fashioned loot grind to play by yourself or, better yet, with others online, this'll satisfy, though you can expect a number of technical problems both minor and major.

If you've played Blizzard's Diablo, Iron Lore's Titan Quest, or Ascaron's 2004 original Sacred, for that matter, the setup here shouldn't be surprising. You click mouse buttons to attack foes, hack away at their power bars, quaff potions like a madman against hard-hitting boss characters, and greedily scoop up all the cash and loot the fallen spill onto the battlefield. Sacred 2 does manage to distinguish itself in a few ways from the other types of high-fantasy, hack-and-slash action RPGs out there, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse.

The Temple Guardian's class mount.

First you've got the game world, Ancaria, which is impressively massive. Though the locations you travel through, from forested Elven areas to jungles, desert plains, and dragon caves laced with rivers of magma, aren't particularly novel, the world is nicely detailed. Yet mixed into this seemingly standard high-fantasy universe filled with orcs, kobolds, lizardmen, evil wizards and monstrous, fiery demon bosses, you get this strange magical substance, called T-Energy, that gives rise to some of the more interesting bits of the fiction. You'll be walking across a field of trees and swaying green grass and suddenly see a pipeline jutting from the earth carrying this glowing blue energy that's the source of conflict in Ancaria.

In some cases this only affects appearances, so instead of fighting a giant beetle you fight a giant beetle with glowing blue limbs, but it also accounts for the dog-headed cyborg Temple Guardian character class. This guy, perhaps modeled on a combination of the Egyptian god Anubis and Donald Sutherland from Virus, runs around Ancaria with a laser blaster. Honestly, this seems a little odd, because everyone else is tossing around magic or smacking each other with medieval weaponry, yet here's the Temple Guardian with his laser gun who, for some reason, still feels the need to carry around old-tech bladed weaponry.

His personality differs from the rest of the field as well. For main quest missions he'll call out sarcastic responses with a Mooninte from Aqua Teen Hunger Force vocal cadence to the quests given to him by NPCs, and in the field he'll randomly exclaim absurd phrases that work to break down the fourth wall. For instance, don't be surprised to hear him say things like, "Look, a number over your head," referring to the genre-standard damage totals that appear as you whack at foes, or "Another step closer to level-up" after killing an enemy, or humming a ridiculous song to himself if you leave him idle too long. It's definitely a refreshing change after playing something that feels more traditional, like the Dryad or Seraphim.

Slash, kill, and upgrade your gear.

The Temple Guardian's quirky personality aside, each class gets some interesting ways to level up and customize how they work. There's the standard statistic-boosting level up where more strength bumps up the damage you do, and more dexterity affects damage and defense ratings. While you'll be managing hit points, you don't have to deal with mana or magic points of any kind. Instead, you'll make customization decisions to decrease the cooldown timers of your abilities, called combat arts. As you move through the world you'll find runes to learn new combat arts, and can power up each individual combat art's level and spend skill points to add other special effects. You can also sell combinations of the runes to vendors and buy different ones. On top of that, combat arts can be combined into combo templates to chain attacks together, which turns out to be useful as the game only lets you slot a specific number of active combat arts at a time.

So clearly there are a lot of methods for diversifying how your particular character performs in battle and the game offers a range of useful and diverse skills, from the Shadow Warrior's ability to summon spectral soldiers to the Temple Guardian's devastating archimedes beam. And on top of all that you get to choose god powers when first creating your character, which can have incredibly powerful effects, though have much longer cooldowns than any of your combat arts. Altogether, it's an interesting system that should keep people busy and provide an incentive to level the six classes in different ways to enjoy the various play styles.

When taking these classes out into the large, open world you'll find there are very few load times, but will also find little that's surprising about the overall structure. The main quest can be aptly described as rambling and unfocused. Though the NPC text boxes along the main quest line are fully voiced, they're not voiced particularly well. Before long you'll be whipping through towns and collecting side quests with little regard to what's written in the text logs, because a large number of them are "X went missing, please retrieve Y things from Z types of enemies!" or some derivation thereof. That being said, a few of the quests are more interesting, like one to retrieve the lost instruments of the game's licensed band, the German metal group Blind Guardian, so they can play a show in Ancaria. You might also discover strange underground chess boards, a mission to test chemicals on a pumpkin that winds up causing a garden to explode with gore, and other types of easter eggs that will reward the more intrepid gamers or those willing to read the quest descriptions.